At some point, a long, long time ago... someone famous (and oft quoted) said "Let there be Light" and there was. Saturday evening saw an amazing crew of blokes come out and work in pitch darkness for 3 hours, seemingly with a very long set of jumper cables - and 'lo, at 8 pm, the mains power was on again after six days. In celebration we immediately ran about turning lights on and off and had a very long, hot shower. Life was and is good. It (almost) seemed a ...

Ho hum, just another day in Ireland... with no mains power...(up to five days already). Thanks be to all and sundry though - we have a generator on the property and well water (pumped by the genny) - So we are a bit limited, but a 1000% better off than the 50,000 or so households still without any power whatsoever. And at least Hurricane Ophelia had a nice ring to it. Yesterday (Thursday), it rained literally all day - hard - no let up and was windy. Stayed ar...

Suffice to say we've not seen cows or cars flying through the air. Yet. The winds started at about 2 am and now (10 am) the storm is well and truly on us. Clouds are hurling themselves through the sky and we lost power about an hour ago. At this point we still have wifi via the phone lines which is grand. Once the weather calms down we'll scuttle out to the barn and get the generator up and running (unless the power company gets things back on track of course). ...

The week passed in a blur with a couple of highlights - Wednesday was the most miserable morning possible to imagine. Gray clouds surrounded us, it still seemed dark at 9 am, there was thick and very determined drizzle. We had the fire lit by 11 am - that's how miseralbe it was. We were settled in for a day of reading, planning and fireside contemplation when I thought to have a look at the weather forecast and bright sunshine was forecast by 2 pm. They were dr...

Our day trip to Cobh was enlightening from the start - first off it's pronounced "Cove"! Of course this makes sense when you think about the woman's name Siobhan (Shi-vorn) - as the Irish language doesn't have a letter "V". Which begs the question - would my name be spelled Bhibhienne? Cobh is a fascinating spot and as with most fascinating spots, its prices are astronomical - so we limited ourself to one paid attraction for which we'd found a miserly 10% disco...